In the last two years, five teams from the BYU Marriott Sandbox program have won the entrepreneurship lottery: half a million dollars and access to Silicon Valley’s network of startup elites. For each team, one application and a 10-minute interview landed them a spot at Y Combinator (YC), a top startup accelerator that has launched companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, Weave, and Podium into global prominence. But the secret of the BYU Marriott’s Sandbox teams’ success wasn’t luck—it was a willingness to fail.
Run by the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology—housed in the BYU Marriott School of Business, BYU Marriott’s Sandbox is an 18-credit, two-semester program in which admitted students primarily focus their time and energy on practical exposure to launching startups in various industries.
Because roughly 90 percent of startups end in failure, BYU Marriott Sandbox conditions students to practice radical adaptability. “The program completely changed the trajectory of my life because it taught me how to pivot out of failure quickly,” says Dallin Bentley, an MISM graduate from South Jordan, Utah, and cofounder of Buster—an AI-powered analytics platform that uses natural language to retrieve and output database information.
Before launching Buster, Bentley and cofounder Blake Rouse, a former strategic management student from Greer, South Carolina, spent months learning through trial and error in the BYU Marriott Sandbox program. Even if students’ startups never launch, they gain valuable experience building a company, working with a team, and handling ambiguity. But those whose ideas do take off may be on the fast-track to a profitable future.
After several startup attempts, Dylan Allen from Flower Mound, Texas, and Ernesto Valencia from San Salvador, El Salvador, created Cheers, a product for small and medium-sized businesses that allows customers to leave reviews in real time. Knowing that YC accepts less than 2 percent of applicants, the recent computer science graduates did not expect to be admitted so quickly.
“When we originally applied to Y Combinator, it was much more of a moonshot idea,” Allen remembers. “Although we loved our idea, we knew the competition was high and acceptance rates were low.”
Following a pivotal 10-minute interview that determined their spot at YC, Bentley and Rouse were selected from a pool of more than 27,000 applicants to become one of 260 companies in YC’s winter 2024 batch. Six months later, Valencia and Allen joined YC’s summer 2024 cohort as part of a similarly small statistic.
Once accepted, the startup founders moved to San Francisco for three months to work closely with YC’s team of investors and advisors. “It’s an opportunity to be surrounded by people who raise your sights on what you can do, how hard you can work, and what your company can become,” Allen states.
With CEOs of billion-dollar companies in the room next door, fresh startup founders might enter YC feeling intense imposter syndrome. “What keeps me grounded is the collaborative spirit,” Valencia says. “They were in our spot at some point, right? And so more than intimidation, I feel inspiration.”
These early-stage entrepreneurs have learned in the hall of the entrepreneurial greats that even the most reputable company founders are human. “The best founders to have ever started companies are normal people,” Rouse affirms. “And if they can do it, we can do it too.”
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Written by Kathryn Cragun